Monthly Archives: August 2016

Kevin Williamson at National Review addresses the zero sum thinking in The New New Malthusians: excerpt: For well over a century after Malthus’s death, variations on his prophecy — that growing human populations would eventually overwhelm the world’s natural resources,…

From National Affairs George Will writes The Limits of Majority Rule. : an excerpt: If the sole, or overriding, goal of the Constitution can be reduced to establishing democracy, and if the distilled essence of democracy is that majorities shall rule in…

from Nikki Johnston-Huston at Huffington Post, The Culture of the Smug White Liberal: unable to copy excerpts, but this is a classic, and I encourage you to link and read the whole thing “The Truth is that Liberalism is about…

Milton Friedman’s basic theory was MV=PT. The supply of Money times its Velocity or turnover equals the Price level times the number of Transactions. Milton assumed the Velocity was relatively fixed and that therefore the control of the supply of…

From Barron’s Stephanie Pomboy: A Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks by Leslie Norton What’s caused this growth in inventories? It isn’t because companies ramped up production. Companies aren’t using cheap capital to increase production and capital expenditures, but are lavishing money…

Glenn Reynolds writes in The USA Today, Our caveman politics- Economic policy based on 100,000-year-old emotions won’t fix healthcare. When human beings were hunter-gatherers living in isolated bands and tribes, which was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years (and longer if you…

from the Wall Street Journal Look Who’s Getting That Bank Settlement Cash –Tens of millions of dollars disguised as ‘consumer relief’ are going to liberal political groups. by Andy Koenig The most recent came in April when the Justice Department announced a…

From The Atlantic, How American Politics Went Insane by Jonathan Rauch The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay,…

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review, Hillary and Her Wheelbarrows Using the clever wheelbarrow analogy Goldberg notes: This whole argument misses the point. What we know from these e-mails, particularly thanks to an analysis by the Associated Press, is that…

from Johan Norberg at The Spectator, Why can’t we see that we’re living in a golden age? Books that say the world is doomed sell rather well, too. I have just attempted the opposite. I’ve written a book called Progress, about…

From The Atlantic, How American Politics Went Insane by Jonathan Rauch The Constitution makes no mention of many of the essential political structures that we take for granted, such as political parties and congressional committees. If the Constitution were all we had,…

“We judge other groups by their worst examples – while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” George W. Bush The “scandal” of the EpiPen pricing is a picture perfect play for those who have a chip on their shoulder about…

Kevin Williamson is probably excerpted or curated at Rebel Yid more than any other writer. In this piece that should be read in full he notes the critical but rarely sited distinction between the welfare state and socialism. In this…

From National Affairs George Will writes The Limits of Majority Rule. I strongly recommend you read the entire essay. an excerpt: Another reason many conservatives favor judicial deference and restraint is what can be called the conservative populist temptation. Conservatives are hardly…

From Barron’s Stephanie Pomboy: A Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks by Leslie Norton The statistics bear this out. Over the last four years, U.S. nominal GDP growth has gone from 4.3% to 4.1% to 3% to 2.4%. The deflator, the inflation…

from Richard Fernandez at PJ Media, The End of the Memory Hole But just to illustrate how things have changed for the State we now know that Orwell was wrong. The mathematically dominant method for recording transactions, whether they involve the transfer of financial assets, intellectual…

From John Cochrane at The Grumpy Economist, Micro vs. Macro: The cause of sclerotic growth is the major economic policy question of our time. The three big explanations are 1) We ran out of ideas (Gordon); 2) Deficient “demand,” remediable…

Political terms evolve and Kevin Williamson makes an rare but important distinction. Providing for the poor from the public sector is not not synonymous with socialism. Socialism is more about government control of the economy than mere redistribution. from Venezuela…

When Cops Seize Property from Michael Haugen at The National Review If this situation sounds like an abuse of constitutional due process, it is — and it gets worse. Because the property itself “commits” a crime under civil forfeiture, the…

from Holman Jenkins, Jr. at The Wall Street Journal, Regulation vs. The American People If Mr. Obama was “deeply frustrated,” the reason was the American people’s lack of support for his agenda. And what the Times calls his regulatory strategy…